#267 Thomas Edison

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. The founders of Tegus are starting to do something really smart. They know they have a great product. They know it's growing like crazy. And so now they're making their brand name ubiquitous. You're gonna see me use this exact playbook. For founders, it's already been happening in the last few weeks, as a matter of fact, but Tegus is on all these podcasts I listened to. Just heard them on Acquired. I heard them on a bunch of the podcasts that I'm on the network of, Invest Like the Best and Business Breakdowns. And I was just reading my friend Liberty's newsletter, and there's a Tegus ad. I'm gonna read what my friend Liberty wrote, and then I'm gonna tell you why this is so important. So it says, Tegus has got you covered on the information front with over 25,000 primary source expert calls covering almost any industry or company that you may wanna learn about and the ability to conduct your own calls with experts if you so choose at a much lower rate than you'll find anywhere else. Tegus is the service to turbocharge the depth and breadth of your knowledge. And so what he's talking about there is the first innovation that Tegus had. They took an existing industry where a ton of companies want to talk to experts about specific companies that they're researching or specific industries that they're researching, whether they wanna do it for an investment or whether you wanna get a lay of the land of the competitive environment in your industry, right? You can get on a phone call and ask an expert in that area anything that you think that they'll know about that helps you make the decision. That has been happening forever. The innovation Tegus did, which was really brilliant, is, hey, let's record and then transcribe these tens of thousands. And I have to be careful what I'm gonna say here because this is still a private company and I have information that I don't think is made public. But there's just, let's just put it this way, they're growing fast and the amount of calls that are happening on their platform every day is ridiculous. And so therefore, the amount of knowledge that happens in their platform is growing at an insane rate. And so instead of just doing one call about one company or one industry, you can literally see everything. There might be 500 different calls about that company or industry that you're interested in. And then since everything is recorded and transcribed, Tegus can then layer all this software on top of it to help you analyze and parse that data. And so the way it's been described to me by somebody that knows that company very well is Tegus is essentially a search engine for business knowledge. It is going to be the hub for where you do research on public and private companies. And so why did I start this by saying, hey, what they're doing is really smart, that I went from not knowing who they were to I can't get away from them. And that can be summarized in a maxim that you and I have talked about on this podcast over and over again, that repetition is persuasive. The more familiar you can make somebody with your company and your brand and what you're offering, the more likely they are to purchase whatever it is, if that service fits them. This is something that I actually learned from David Ogilvy. And he made the fantastic point in his book Ogilvy on Advertising. He's like, listen, advertising, you need to treat the advertising of your product as a production cost. And so this is what Ogilvy said. He says, I've come to regard advertising as part of the product. It should be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint on any other essential ingredient in your product. There's a variation of that idea that Izzy Sharp, who founded Four Seasons, actually talked about in his autobiography, which I thought was interesting. And he says, it's tempting during a recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27%. But studies show that during these recessions, the companies that didn't cut their ad spend had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So what Izzy did, he's like, okay, we're in a temporary pullback, we're in a temporary recession. I'm still spending, to build up the advertising and the brand awareness of the Four Seasons brand, this was the result. So we didn't cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it to gain brand recognition and which continued advertising sustains. And so all of these thoughts are tied into repetition is persuasive. What Tegus is doing is they're doing exactly that line at the end with what Izzy just said, the continued advertising sustains. That is a smart move by the founders. If you wanna see all the services that Tegus offers, just go to tegus.com, it's tegus.com. You can see for yourself and you can start a free trial. Stick around to the end of this episode and I'm gonna tell you this text message conversation about Enzo Ferrari that I had with the founder, Michael. This episode is also brought to you by 87 Capital. This is my friend Sam Hincky's venture capital firm. I almost even hesitate calling it a venture capital firm. If you go to 87 Capital, even if you're not interested in raising money, if you go to 87capital.com, just read it and you'll see, I think, what is a fantastic example of storytelling. And if you listen to the end of last week's episode, you can hear me talk about, I think it's like for five or 10 minutes, something like that, about the weekend that I spent with Sam recently in California. And one of the reasons I'm comfortable to have Sam be an advertiser on this podcast, first of all, I don't even think he needs to advertise. I'm pretty sure he just does it because he likes the podcast and he wants to see it do well. But I've talked to him all the time. The way, it's very clear, like the way he feels about his work is the exact same way that I feel about mine. And just like I'm trying to bring a unique approach to what I'm doing, he's doing the exact same thing. He's not just looking to just fund a bunch of different startups. He wants long-term partnerships with insanely talented people, what he would call tens. The way I think Sam thinks about people is very similar. I gotta ask him if he's read. It's very similar to Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. I'm almost positive that Sam has read Ed's autobiography, Creativity, Inc. The way Sam thinks about people, and I think this is important because it's something you and I can also learn from, is very similar, at least to me, my interpretation of when you read Creativity, Inc., like what Ed Catmull said. So I just want to read a couple of highlights from Creativity, Inc., because it's fantastic. And he says, first he starts out, he goes, and this is why Sam says, hey, I invest in founders I love that have ideas I like. He puts people before everything else. So he says, listen, Ed says, if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either throw it, fix it, or throw it out, or throw it away, and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating. This is still Ed talking, okay? Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.